Service discovery and key-value store Consul is now available in version 1.5, mainly updating the project’s UI as well as its service mesh Connect and introducing features such as centralised configurations.

Once they’ve switched to the latest version, lovers of the old UI unfortunately won’t be able to use it anymore. The whole thing has finally been removed, which is why setting CONSUL_UI_LEGACY won’t get you the desired result anymore. The new UI on the other hand comes with a revamped Service Instances page and better insight into Connect Proxies, as well as more granular searches for the Service listing page.

Another breaking change you might stumble upon is the move of the /watch package to the API module (github.com/hashicorp/consul/api/watch). Those importing it as a library therefore need to update their import statement.

In v1.5, some services and proxy defaults can be defined globally and inherited by affected service registration. Also, access control lists have been improved, which means that there is support for Kubernetes Auth Provider Login and tokens can be assigned to roles. Tokens can now also be fitted with an expiration time and a set of service identities.

Other than that a lot of work has gone into moving Connect forward, so that the service mesh now supports L7 observability and load balancing via Envoy.

If you’re interested in reading up on Consul and how to get started, be advised that the guides for that have been moved to HashiCorp’s learning platform, and can now be found at learn.hashicorp.com/consul.